WimVanDeBospoort

A section where I will share more or less random tips on using Octane with the Poser plugin.

Spotlights in Octane.

There are several ways you can use spotlights in Octane, unfortunately not yet the new native spotlights which were recently introduced in Octane.

The traditional way of adding a spotlight is by using IES distribution maps. This works fine but has a few disadvantages over the type of spotlights we are used to in Poser: No control over size (cone) or falloff of the light.

But there is another way of adding a spotlight.

If you use an image like this as distribution map,

you can have full control over its size and falloff. To make that work, set its projection mode to Box and set its coordinate space to Normal Space.

You can control the direction of the beam by rotating the emitter, its cone size by scaling the UV transform and the falloff can be adjusted by scaling the emitter itself.

By using a relatively small spot on the distribution image, the scaling of the emitter on which the image is mapped will define the edge of the small spot.